


Ciara's Nightmare

by CarnationGem (Akumeoi)



Series: Ciavran [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Body Horror, Broodmothers, Broodmothers (Dragon Age), Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Horror, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 04:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11097213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumeoi/pseuds/CarnationGem
Summary: Warden Tabris has a horrible nightmare about the death of her fiancé.





	Ciara's Nightmare

She’s back in the Arl’s dingy prison with Soris at her side, and the cook’s boy’s run away, and the bow’s in her hand, but something is wrong, it’s very wrong, and she can’t quite put her finger on it.

They haven’t found Nelaros, they said he would be waiting, but he isn’t here yet. He isn’t here, and Soris is behind her but he won’t speak. He won’t speak, and there are lumps on the walls that shouldn’t be there. Her knife carves one open like a ribless carcass. Inside: a dagger. Lovely.

There’s blood splattering her clothing. It’s from the fighting, of course, and she doesn’t know where the bodies are, but there’s an awful lot of blood on the floor, too - and was she the one who put it there? It’s hard to say, hard to care when she’s so focused on the door. That door. The door behind which the last obstacle to her friends’ safety still breathes his foul, moneyed breaths. Oh, how she’ll crush him. He won’t have time to pray. None of them will.

If only the air didn’t smell so much like rotting meat.

There it is, there it is. Hands reaching to grasp the doornob, unlock, the picks jingle, click, turn. There’s Shianni, there’s Nola, and there’s Valora. Good.

But it’s not the Arl of Denerim behind them. It’s the Broodmother.

Ciara sees the wrinkled mounds of flesh and the raw, red, bulbous chunks of meat and the inhuman grin with black lips pulled back over rotting white jaws and gums, and this is enough to make her gag, make her choke, make the bile rise in her throat. But all at once her friends’ feet lift off the ground, tentacles exploding out of the earth beneath them in a spray of blood and dirt, and she retches. They’re like dead rats speared on tainted, slimy skewers, like demonic puppets being held up by Death himself. Their eyes are blank, but they’re still screaming. She fires arrow after arrow but her head is roaring and Soris, Soris is dead too. He’s exploded into a slick green cloud, and there’s Nelaros, shaken like a sack until all his bones broke and he became a pierced red fleshbag, and now… and now…

The poison hits her. The Broodmother falls silent. And Ciara knows. _First day, they come._ It’s her own skin heating with cursed fever, rotting down to the bone before her nearly-blinded silver eyes. It’s her own jaw distending and elongating and gaping wide to eat the living flesh of men. It’s her own belly swelling and growing with thousands of pustulent black eggs. In her ears the chant of the damned roars, crashes, and breaks in unbearably loud, echoing waves.

_Sixth day, she screams._

The ground opens up. It’s dark. She’s falling. She’s screaming. She’s screaming. Oh, she’s screaming.

_Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!_

Then it’s not dark anymore, but she’s still screaming.

And her whole body is shaking, but it’s not just from the tremors that wrack her, it’s because Zevran is holding her shoulders and saying, “Wake up, my love, wake up.” And she wants to, but she can’t, because she was there and the Broodmother was real. And he knows this, knows that some things in this world can’t be forgotten even in the light of a dawn seen from the shelter of your lover’s arms. She knows he knows because he was the one who dealt the final blow and cut the Broodmother’s massive head off. She saw that, too.

“Hush, my love. Hush.”

She presses her face into his chest and her shoulders shake and she almost dry heaves but she swallows it down. His hands stroke her hair. They’re real. He’s real. He’s alive.

_Nelaros isn't alive._

She pushes that thought away and when he kisses her, she pretends to herself that his touch can erase every foul memory of Orzammar and of nobles and of power and of greed.

And for a while, it does.

In the morning Oghren winks at her and Morrigan rolls her eyes at the bruise on her neck and Wynne looks even more disapproving than usual. And they do it because they heard her cry out and they think they know why she invites the gold-eyed assassin into her tent every night. But Ciara knows that if they really knew, if they understood, if they remembered, if they’d been there at all - they’d be having nightmares right along with her.

And she doesn’t want that, either.


End file.
